Moment cops dig up Channel migrant dinghies hidden deep under French beach in blow to smugglers
CHANNEL migrant smugglers are hiding boats deep under French beaches, police have revealed.
A haul of nautical equipment was found by officers buried along the beach at the resort of Wimereux.
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The find included an inflatable dinghy, an outboard motor, lifejackets and oars.
The gangs are stowing their boats underground at night and directing migrants to dig them up, inflate them and set off on crossings.
A French officer told The Sun: 'The equipment was all neatly packaged and ready for use when the migrants arrived.
'This follows lots of cars being driven by the smugglers being intercepted, so that the boats can be confiscated.
'They now seem to be hiding the boats late at night, leaving them there for a while, and then telling their clients where to find them.'
Migrants are paying up to £1,300 for a perilous passage to Britain on the dug-up boats.
They can be packed with 80 people — but are designed to carry 20.
Pictures taken by Calais police show a French officer using a shovel to dig up a boat from the sands at Wimereux last week.
Huge numbers of migrants are now reaching England's south coast, lured by the promise of free hotels, healthcare and little prospect of being deported.
A record 1,194 arrived on a single day last month while French officers stopped just 184 out of 1,378.
Starmer 'loses control' as over 1,000 migrants cross Channel in biggest daily total of 2025 – as French cops watch on
The total figure for 2025 is now close to 15,000, the highest figure recorded in the first five months of a year.
The 42 per cent increase has heaped pressure on Sir Keir Starmer 's Labour government, whose pledge to smash smuggling gangs has failed to deliver results.
Figures also show French police have intercepted just 38 per cent of migrants in small boats this year.
That's down from 45 per cent in 2024, despite a £480million UK handout for extra officers and surveillance equipment on beaches.
In the year to April, there were 33 boats with more than 80 people on board, compared with 11 in 2024 and one in 2023, figures from French and UK Home Office show.
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The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. 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He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
